


The Gulfs that Separate

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [90]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:48:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24403837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Jet likes his Jedi, and Bacara respects him.  Neither of them trust him.
Series: Soft Wars [90]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 27
Kudos: 409





	The Gulfs that Separate

The tragedy of it is Jet actually likes the old man a little.

Holocom blue washes the room pale from it’s center, twisting shadows to fill far corners with things that claw at prey instincts and painting men all edges and extremes like something not quite dead enough. Winders hold both watch and silence.

Does Mundi feel them at all? How can he not, when even Jet can hear their hearts in their measured breaths.

There is nothing of Bacara in The Marine, nothing at all. There is an empty shell reporting and Jet stares and stares and stares but through the visor there’s nothing of the tired eyes that meet them personally when they fly in, regardless of the state on the ground. There’s nothing of the shoulders that tip in reluctant draw to Jet’s own hands in the hard flat lines of him. There’s nothing of the colors of his soul in the blue of the comm.

It was easier when Jet hadn’t known there was a much of a man inside The Marine shell at all.

“You should have held position.”

Mundi is not a soldier. The real tragedy of this war is that it has pulled men like Mundi anywhere near it’s edges. That it funneled men like him towards the sharp point of it’s fronts. When this is done (in as much sometimes as Jet can ever believe this will be done, in as often as he reminds himself that when ‘Alor moves one way or another this _will_ be done.) When that day comes Jet prays they find Mundi a nice library somewhere. Real books, with those nice covers. Warm colored floors. Soft surfaces, maybe, ones that absorb sound. Some place Mundi can be surrounded by history texts or finance records or something like that. Some place he can be happy. And where he can’t do any harm.

The tragedy is that Jet likes him a little, in the way of something a little bit helpless that’s wandered in somewhere it didn’t quite belong.

Mundi lectures like a man used to it. The Marine listens, like one without a choice. “There’s a high probability they would have surrendered, once they had an idea of your numbers. You didn’t even consider that an option!”

Jet is cold but the room is not. He is steady; the floor is flat and steel under his boots but the nerves in his skin fire like wind whipping past in freefall. He spares a moment to be proud, so so proud, that both his Winders hold position. That there’s not a whisper out of them.

No, Jet knows. No Bacara wouldn’t have considered that an option. Jet doesn’t have to see under The Marine’s bucket to know that. Bacara would never have given the enemy a chance to know the location of his fighting force, or the size. There’s not a clone commander in the GAR who would.

To Bacara, any risk to his men is unacceptable: if a threat is presented it is to be eliminated promptly, and nuances of situations are left to electric spikes of midnight regret. To Mundi, all lives are equatable: the brother is worth exactly the same as the Separatist on the other side of the front line.

Their ideologies will never meet.

Jet likes Mundi, a little, but he thinks it might be because he never has to trust his Winders to him.

“Sir,” The Marine begins, but Mundi has already stopped listening. He’s given up on Bacara, on all of them, Jet thinks. He’s given up on trying to make them relate to the enemies whittling them away. He doesn’t realize Jet _knows_ there’s might be a man under an enemy shell, that he knows and consciously chooses his brothers anyway. That a brother is worth a Sep, a Sep squad a Sep company a Sep armada.

It must be a blow, to a Jedi.

“Just do whatever it is that you were going to do anyway,” Mundi dismisses, divests himself entirely of the situation with shaking, blue-green veined hands brushed down rough-spun sleeves. It is done, it is over and Mundi can no longer affect it. He will accept it. He will move on to new calculations. This is what it means, to give yourself to the Force.

To Mundi, the Force is in angles and trajectories, in percentages and likelihoods, in all beings taken together to make up the calculation of the universe. The Force is numbers, _everything_ is numbers. In the end the tragedy is Mundi and Bacara run their calculations with different weights.

The General dashes off the comm in a violent motion that is unnatural to him and takes long moments in search of center. Lights at the corners of the room grow and flood white as if to drown out the memory of the holocom.

Mundi is not a soldier. He doesn’t believe that loss is inevitable, and that it’s best to try to make sure that as much of that loss is on the enemy side as possible. This long into the war, and Mundi still believes he can make the numbers balance.

Jet would admire his idealism, if men weren’t dying for it.

“I pity you, you know,” he grates finally and Jet doesn’t react. None of the Winders do; this isn’t anything new. Mundi’s shed tears for them before, for this notion of them he’s constructed that nothing in the past three years could shake. Mundi never budges from his determinations, for good or ill. “I pity all of these children that we built. Bred for war and knowing nothing else. This, more than the war, is Jedi’s greatest failing.” He shudders a moment, quakes, before he pulls his dignity about him like a shell and sweeps away trailing distress like the glittering dust of a comet’s tail.

He pities them, children bought for war, like they pity him, a man scored by it.

“Get Nova back on comms,” Jet orders but his men are already moving. Spark slams in numbers he’s memorized and the curses he spills are prayers that the signal still holds. Blackout pulls star charts, marks fleets and battles hazards and the miracles they need to make it through. Winder’s used up all their blessings, drained the Galaxy near dry of her luck, burned through the favor of every god they’ve found to listen.

But there’s always one more run to make.

Silver glints an arc like a meteor, high near to the ceiling to twist back delicate spinning light like a starfall. Jet catches it with one hand, rips his helmet off with the other.

There are rules. It can’t touch the ceiling. You have to read it on bare skin and with bare eyes. You can’t lie.

Jet catches the coin, rips off his helmet and his off-hand bracer and slaps body-warm real silver to the back of a steady hand.

There’s one more run to make, and if the Galaxy is kind she’s got one more favor she can dig up for them. His main-hand slides away.

“Chief,” Spark begs and restarts the hailing procedure when it fails. “Chief, what’s she say?”

They are warriors, the Winders. They are soldiers and warriors and Vode. But they’re spacers, and there’s not a spacer alive who doesn’t believe in luck. Not one who stays alive very long.

Jet slaps the coin down on the back of his right hand. He can’t read the words that ring the edges, hasn’t found anyone who can, but Commander Gree’s found enough to tell him The Lady’s name is Acina and she was a queen.

“She’s smiling.” They trust him, Spark and Blackout both. They know you don’t lie about The Lady, but they pull their own buckets off, put their own eyes on her. Blackout picks the coin up, makes sure the back is still stamped cog-within-hexagon.

The coin lands face up, the Lady’s smiling, and Spark will reconnect with Nova and Blackout will find a way through.

The hail fails. Spark retries.

One of them breathes hate, and Jet will do them the favor of not looking to confirm which.

Mundi is still Jet’s Jedi. Still Bacara’s. As his commanders, it’s their job to protect him. From the Seps, from himself, from the acid-tinged words of the men.

“Enough.” Jet gives so few orders, he runs his company with such a light touch other brothers wonder how they operate at all. But they do and this is how: Jet gives the orders he feels he needs to. They are always, unhesitatingly followed.

The tragedy of it is Mundi has tried so hard reach them, to pull them to the ideal where he’s made his stand. The tragedy of it is Jet and Bacara both have done the same. Both sides have planted their feet. Both have given up on ever reaching the other.

Neyo disdains him. Bacara respects him. Jet likes him, a little. In a perfect galaxy, one of them would trust him.

But that’s not for the men to know. That’s for Neyo and Bacara and Jet to know, and to plan contingency around.

The hail goes through.

For a frozen echo of a moment Jet fears, again again again always pointlessly but always again, that all that’s left is The Marine.

There’s stitches high on his cheekbone and exhaustion folding creases around his lips. “Bacara,” Jet breathes and dredges up a smile for the man who has few of his own. “Bacara. Anyone who told you blonds like scars lied.”

Whoever Bacara prays to when he closes his eyes is freer with granting patience than they are with granting luck. Jet will take the frustration, the annoyance, so long as he doesn’t get the corpse-like stillness. So long as the siege the Nova’s just broke didn’t consume Bacara and spit back the bones of The Marine to marionette in his boots.

“We’re scrambling,” Jet promises. “We’re scrambling now. Full resupply.”

“We can hold out,” Bacara says. Nova can hold out; Winder will not let them have to.

Jet holds him, long as he can. Tells him wild tales of places he’s been in their interim, flavors his tales with a storytellers’ license. Jet pushes lies through his teeth, rolls them off the tip of his tongue with oily practice, because the moment Bacara asks for conversation is far beyond the moment when he first actually needs it. Their time is measured in minutes, and Jet fills every heartbeat with sound until the lines of Bacara’s face don’t look sliced into him, until he offers back spare words as dry as autumn leaves and twice as brittle.

Spark signs the warning before the signal starts to degrade. He doesn’t want to add his words to that, when he’s usually so free with them. The Winders know how fragile Novas are, and they’re all terrified of being the ones to rend lines in the delicate membranes holding them together.

“We’re coming,” Jet swears. A realspace crawl, Blackout gestures. They can’t risk hyperspace. “A tenday. No more. We’re coming. You just have to clear us a landing.”

Bacara’s gratitude burns all the way down Jet’s lungs

“I haven’t had a good snuggle in a month,” he chokes and he’s told enough lies that this will pass as well. “Don’t schedule me a bed. I’ll share yours.”

Bacara’s irritation is so much easier to bear than his gratitude.


End file.
